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TicketsArts & Theatre · GBJosh Pugh: Ha Ha, Yeah SoundEventim Apollo · LondonThe profile · researched 23 October 2026
Josh Pugh: from Atherstone futsal halls to the Eventim Apollo
The Warwickshire stand-up, Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee and former England para footballer is midway through his biggest tour to date, with a Channel 4 sitcom he wrote himself due in November 2026.
Atherstone, futsal and a late start
Josh Pugh was born in Nuneaton on 20 August 1989 and grew up a few miles up the road in Atherstone, where he still lives. He was diagnosed as a child with ocular albinism and nystagmus, conditions affecting the pigmentation of his eyes that make outdoor football awkward and limit his useful vision to a short radius. He played as a boy, stopped when the game moved up to eleven-a-side, and spent a while cycling through rugby, athletics and boxing before a friend at college took him to partially sighted futsal.
That turned into a decade-long international career. Pugh played for England's partially sighted side from 2012, rose to vice-captain and appeared in two World Cup finals, talking in a 2023 England Football interview about the squad's job being to raise awareness so that visually impaired children get offered the game at all. For much of that period the football and the comedy ran in parallel, which makes the chronology unusual: by the time he first stood on a stage he already had an international sporting career going.
He began performing stand-up in 2014 and the competition circuit took to him quickly. He won Midland New Act of the Year in 2014 and then again in 2015, took the new act competitions at both the Birmingham and Nottingham comedy festivals in 2015, and was named English Comedian of the Year in 2016.
Five Fringes and a nomination
Pugh made five trips to the Edinburgh Fringe between 2017 and 2023, and the one that changed his standing was the fourth. Sausage, Egg, Josh Pugh, Chips and Beans ran at Monkey Barrel 4 at 2.10pm from 3 to 14 and 17 to 28 August 2022, an hour built out of the previous two years of his life: trying for a baby, and accidentally losing Captain Tom's birthday cards. It was nominated for Best Show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards 2022.
The reviews identified the trick that still runs through his work. The Skinny gave it four stars and called him a hugely charming comic, noting that he sets up routines which tease straight-up chauvinism and then pulls the floor out from under them, and that the hour moved into harder territory than the joke rate suggested — IVF, new fatherhood, and the emotional habits he had inherited from his own father. His child had been born in December 2021. British Comedy Guide described the lightly surreal jokes as consistently superb across the hour.
He toured that show in 2023 and followed it with Existin' La Vida Loca in 2024, both playing to sold-out rooms. In between he went back to Monkey Barrel 4 for a plainly titled new hour, 1 to 8 August 2023 at 3.35pm, which the Guardian rated four stars and called stealthy, clever and heartwarming.
Panel shows, a writers' room and a stepdad sitcom
The television work accumulated across the same period: Live at the Apollo, Mock the Week, Hypothetical, Question Team, Mel Giedroyc: Unforgivable and Rosie Jones's Disability Comedy Extravaganza. Less visibly, he has written for 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Newsjack and The Now Show — a jobbing-writer CV that explains the sheer number of jokes he can fit into an hour. He has acted in Sneakerhead, The Power of Parker in 2023 and Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping in 2025, and presented coverage of the 2024 Paralympic Games for Channel 4.
The bigger prize is Stepping Up. It started as a Channel 4 Comedy Blap in 2024, with Pugh as an over-enthusiastic stepdad bringing well-meant chaos into a family that had been managing fine without him, and the pilot was good enough to earn a full commission: six half-hours, written by and starring Pugh, made by Roughcut Television, directed by Jack Clough and executive produced by Ash Atalla.
Denise Welch plays Josh's mother Sue, Sophia Di Martino his partner Becky, Tom Hanson her ex-husband Sean and Lucia Keskin his friend Kelcie, with Colin Hoult and Liam Jeavons among the guest cast. It was shot in the West Midlands, close to where Pugh grew up. As of late October 2026 the series has not yet gone out; British Comedy Guide lists it as due in November, which would place the broadcast directly on top of the final weeks of the tour.
September 2026 onwards
The most recent addition to his output is the oddest. On 13 September 2026, at 6pm, The Pete Doherty Show launched on YouTube — a video podcast made with the Libertines frontman, filmed around Margate, with the two of them wandering the Kent resort, meeting locals and interviewing guests including the comics Ivo Graham and Jamali Maddix. Doherty's stated reason for wanting Pugh involved was simply that he is funny, and that his bandmates had taken to watching Pugh's online sketches on the tour bus. Pugh said he had tried to stay in Doherty's company and be a fan of him, with just enough professionalism to keep the thing moving.
Those online sketches are the other half of his profile. The weekly videos reach an audience that has nothing to do with the Fringe or the panel shows, and they are a large part of why a comic who was winning new act heats in 2015 is now selling a 3,500-capacity hall in London.
Before the tour began he tested the new hour in public without putting it in the Fringe programme — three lunchtime shows at Monkey Barrel on 10, 11 and 12 August 2026, followed by another on 6 September. The tour itself opened on 3 September.
The current hour
Ha Ha, Yeah Sound is advertised with the sort of blurb Pugh tends to write for himself: after two sell-out tours, he is back performing stand-up to the best of his ability for an hour and a bit. It runs from 3 September to 29 November 2026 across roughly 25 dates, and it is a step up in room size — Theatre Royal Brighton on 8 October, Nottingham Playhouse on 22 October, Stafford Gatehouse on 25 October, two nights at Leeds City Varieties on 27 and 28 October, Theatre Royal Wakefield on 29 October, two shows at Sheffield's Peddler Warehouse on 31 October, St George's Hall in Liverpool on 1 November, Epic Studios in Norwich on 5 November, the Eventim Apollo in London on 8 November, the Glee Club in Cardiff on 15 November, Coventry Empire on 19 November, Manchester Opera House on 22 November, Cambridge Junction on 25 November, the Y Theatre in Leicester on 27 November and Birmingham Symphony Hall on 29 November.
The material has moved on with his life. He now has two children, and the hour works through domestic detail, air fryers, and the gap between the arty company he keeps through work and the friends he has kept at home. He opens on his own nerves, including an admission of having made a mess of the previous night's show, which sets the register for everything after it.
The warm-up run drew an unusually forthright response from the Have You List newsletter, which saw it as a tremendous move on from work that was already strong, singled out the joke density and the energy level, and concluded that the tour should be proper lift-off. Earlier shows have left him with quotable lines from the Telegraph, which called the comedy remarkably solid and dependable and the hour satisfying, and from the Wee Review, which described pub-grub comedy served up with cordon-bleu flair.
The show, now
Ha Ha, Yeah Sound is a solo stand-up hour with no interval gimmickry and no set to speak of: microphone, stage, and a joke count high enough that reviewers keep remarking on it. The Brighton date on 8 October 2026 ran 70 minutes, with support from Raj Poojara; British Comedy Guide lists the running time as about an hour and fifteen. Pugh opens on his own nervousness before moving through family life with two young children, domestic routine, air fryers, and the friction between the people he meets through comedy in London and the friends he kept in Atherstone, where he still lives. The Brighton review praised the pacing - no dead air, but enough space to register each joke - and called it comedy for a wide room that was nonetheless well above average. The warm-up shows at Monkey Barrel in August 2026 drew a notice describing the set as superb and the tour as likely lift-off, on the strength of the density of material and the energy sustained across the hour. Venues range from the Peddler Warehouse in Sheffield to the Eventim Apollo on 8 November and Birmingham Symphony Hall on 29 November, the final date, with tickets still on sale across the closing weeks.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · chortle.co.uk · comedy.co.uk · comedy.co.uk · comedy.co.uk · theskinny.co.uk · chortle.co.uk · beyondthejoke.co.uk